Amazon.com Guide to Marie-Antoinette

Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Tuesday, September 21, 2010

These were the real David Copperfields and Oliver Twists. Beaten, exploited and abused, they never knew what it was to have a full belly or a good night's sleep. Their childhood was over before it had begun. Using the heartbreaking first-person testimony of these child labourers, Humphries demonstrates that the brutality and deprivation depicted by authors such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy was commonplace during the Industrial Revolution, and not just fictional exaggeration.

She also reveals that more children were working than previously thought - and at younger ages.
As British productivity soared, more machines and factories were built, and so more children were recruited to work in them. During the 1830s, the average age of a child labourer officially was ten, but in reality some were as young as four.

While the upper classes professed horror at the iniquities of the slave trade, British children were regularly shackled and starved in their own country. The silks and cottons the upper classes wore, the glass jugs and steel knives on their tables, the coal in their fireplaces, the food on their plates - almost all of it was produced by children working in pitiful conditions on their doorsteps.

But to many of the monied classes, the poor were invisible: an inhuman sub-species who did not have the same feelings as their own and whose sufferings were unimportant. If they spared a thought for them at all, it was nothing more than a shudder of revulsion at the filth and disease they carried.

Living conditions were appalling. Families occupied rat and sewage-filled cellars, with 30 people crammed into a single room. Most children were malnourished and susceptible to disease, and life expectancy in such places fell to just 29 years in the 1830s. In these wretched circumstances, an extra few pennies brought home by a child would pay for a small loaf of bread or fuel for the fire: the difference between life and death. A third of poor households were without a male breadwinner, either as a result of death or desertion. In the broken Britain of the 19th century, children paid the price.

10 comments:

Didn't William Cobbett write something to the effect that he would rather, given the choice, have been the hardest-working slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation than a "free" laborer in England's factories?

The poor are still invisible to many in our society.....and are considered inferior because we look at how much one owns rather than the condition of one's soul in terms of placing value on a person. I am not denying that conditions generally were worse then, just that one would think poverty would be close to non-existent now. Between the Wolves of Wall Street, Government spending, natural disasters, many are currently in dire straits.

We should bring back child labor!!!We should get the indolent, insolent larvae out of the malls, off the curbs and skateboards, and back in the mills where they belong. We could have a rebirth of manufacturing, we could end illegal immigration, we could reverse the trade deficit! Gentle Readers - don't think for one moment that labor conditions in China today are any better.

Tubbs, right on!! I could not pull into my driveway today because they had parked their bikes, skateboards, etc. there. Oh for those 90 degree days when the little buggers stayed indoors playing on their electronic equipment and tormenting their parents instead of the neighbors. (Of course, MY children were perfect angels.)

Funny coindicence - I found these interesting details about a penitentiary that stood for 300 years on the site of Westminster Cathedral before being closed for being TOO GOOD (ie encouraging recidivism as an escape from indigency)

Other than Tubbs' sardonic riff on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, I'm thanking God the comments on this post have been mercifully free of Ayn Rand-ian, homilies on this as being a cruel-but-fair example of the "free market" in action.

Although they'd be reluctant to admit it, more than a few U.S. conservatives (like their British forbears), would profess horror at this, then quickly get in touch with their inner Glenn Becks, and recall that "…'Social justice' is always coded language for socialism!" (Unfortunately, it's a safe bet that most of that gentleman's followers have probably never read any of the papal encyclicals on labor.)

This is, after all, essentially the same exploitative business model (with young adult labor force) that now fills Wal-Mart with what one truth-teller has called the "abundant, cheap crap from China" that has all but decimated American manufacturing.

American labor unions 'decimated' American manufacturing, China just picked up the slack (and India, Guatemala, etc.) Almost all 'jobs' in this country are service oriented which do not pay what manufacturing jobs paid.

@Julygirl, thanks for your comment. FYI, I grew up in a single-parent, teachers union-member household. I was so (not) impressed by what I saw at the interminable union functions I was a captive audience for as a child, that I immediately became a conservative activist upon entering college. So, I've seen both sides of this issue usually framed as Big Labor vs. Right-to-Work.

Likewise, I carry no brief whatsoever for the politically-corrupt monstrosities that many unions have become, however I also totally reject the notion that they're primarily responsible for the decline of manufacturing in the U.S., for which the policy elites of *both* nominal major parties bear a heavy burden. This was clearly planned, and no amount of whiggish inside-the-beltway talking points will make it otherwise.

I recall a certain former Speaker of the House (with presidential ambitions in 2012) assuring us in the 1990's with a straight face that NAFTA/GATT/WTO-enabled tranfers of manufacturing capacity and national sovereignty would result in countless "new manufacturing jobs" for U.S. workers, not their wholesale loss to China and the developing world.

To paraphrase TV's Dr. Phil, "How's that working out for you, America?"

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